Saturday, 22 February 2014

A senior academic at London
University has advised me that it would be ‘strategic’, in terms of my ‘career
development’, to remove from my personal website a comment by a former student
questioning the role of capitalist market forces in Higher Education.

McCarthy, Tough on the Causes of Equality

However tempted to ask this
professor if s/he realises that s/he sounds like Senator Joseph McCarthy, I instead
asked myself whether we have all forgotten how to visualise a better world in
which financial markets did not rule us. For if we stop trying to visualise
utopia - a good community with mutual respect, state-funded edifying
entertainment, and universal education and healthcare, for example - we really
are in trouble. Imagining how wonderful life could be for homines sapientes is
a prerequisite of actually achieving social progress.

Emmet Brickowski, hero of the Lego Movie

What makes today’s absence of utopian thinking
so sad is that people are not stupid. There is a widespread, heartfelt understanding of what our
problems are. Three popular movies I have recently seen (Hunger Games, the Lego
Movie, and Elysium) all portray imagined future dystopias. In all three,
no-holds-barred capitalism has trashed the environment beyond repair, created a
cynical, gated ruling class, desperate to hang onto its privileges, and reduced
everyone else to abject poverty.

In all three movies, inspirational
working-class heroes stand up against the tyrannical über-rich and bring down
their evil governments. But then the film ends. Not one has the remotest
concept of a fairer economic system and happier society to put in place of
persecutory rule by capitalist Bad Guys.

Fighting for Healthcare, Hollywood-style

The gated community in Elysium is called after
the ancient Greek islands where the fortunate deceased spent a blissful
eternity. The repeated experience of founding new colonies made the Greeks
think hard about the circumstances conducive to human flourishing.From Hesiod’s Golden Race, and comedies in
which all the slaves were liberated, to the philosophers’ ideal polities
(Plato’s Republic was just one of several), the Greeks were constantly debating
the nature of the ideal community.

My favourite ancient utopia is Iambulus’
Islands of the Sun, where work, government and intellectual life are fairly
shared by everyone: ‘They alternately serve one another, some of them fishing,
others working at the crafts, others occupying themselves in other useful
matters, and still others—except for the very aged—performing public duties in
cyclic rotation… Every branch of learning is diligently pursued by them.’

The best thing about being a Sun Islander is
that everyone had a tongue with two tips, which meant s/he could carry on two
conversations simultaneously with two people, ‘responding to the questions of
one with one prong of the tongue, while conversing familiarly about current
events with the other.’

Such a tongue
would allow me to talk to university Management in a ‘strategic’ way and
‘develop my career,’ while still engaging with everybody else in optimistic discussion about how we might one day, just possibly, manage things better. On the other
hand, perhaps I’ll continue talking utopia to everyone indiscriminately and to
hell with ‘career development’.

Saturday, 15 February 2014

Lecturing
yesterday in Berlin, on Plato, Aristotle and the transformative power of music, prompts
my belated obituary for Pete Seeger, great American and folk singer whose views
on race and the environment were decades ahead of his time. Convinced that getting people to sing
together could play a crucial role in promoting peace and economic equality, he
stressed often, as here on youtube,
‘I usually quote Plato, who said, It is very dangerous to allow the wrong kind
of music in the Republic.’

He
spent two years at Harvard as a Sociology major, but dropped out when his professor
told him, ‘Don’t think you can change the world. The only thing you can do is
study it.’ In Seeger’s interviews the ancient Greeks are more prominent than
any Sociologists.

Anaphora and Civil Rights

On
Thistle Radio in 2008 he explained the power of ‘poetry in what the Greeks
called anaphora, which means that the
beginning of each line has the same word, or same phrase. The line may not rhyme at all, but it's
poetry because it has this regular form… look at Dr King's great speeches,
"I have a dream, da-da-da, I have a dream, da-da-da-da, I have a
dream." Or "Give us the Vote,
da-da-da, Give us the Vote, da-da-da-da, Give us the Vote!"’ Seeger advised
using anaphora ‘whenever people get pessimistic about the world,’ as in his
version of Ecclesiastes:

A time to be born, a time to die

A time to plant, a time to reap

A time to laugh, a time to weep

A time to kill, a time to heal

The
anaphoric people’s anthem We Shall
Overcome will forever be associated with Seeger on the 1965 march from
Alabama to Washington alongside Martin
Luther King Jr, but Seeger said his sole contribution to the anthem was to
change the second word from ‘will’ to ‘shall,’ because it ‘opens up the mouth
better.’ He encouraged everyone to sing with their heads tilted upwards,
pouring out their open vowels together to the heavens. He preferred to sing out
of doors and on the road: some of his most influential appearances were in the
enormous outdoor Greek theater of Los Angeles in summer 1969.

The Greek Theater, Los Angeles

Perhaps
there is a book to be written about American Agit-Folk and the Greek and Roman
Classics. No doubt Seeger did not just learn how to jump between train roofs
from his mentor Woody Guthrie, but sang with him (back in the days when popular
songs had not yet pointlessly confined themselves to the narrow topic of romantic
love), the hilarious and moving lyrics to Biggest Thing That Man Has
Ever Done:

Saturday, 8 February 2014

When Shakespeare retold the story of Coriolanus, the
general in the Roman republic who alienated the plebeians, he did so with
added hunger. The play was probably written in 1608. The previous three
years had seen famine and food riots—the so-called Midland Revolt.

Coriolanus Snow

Shakespeare
adapted Plutarch's Life
of Coriolanus to make the crisis it portrays resemble the recent English
experience. As the citizen says in the opening scene, the rich ‘ne’er cared for
us / yet: suffer us to famish, and their store-houses / crammed with grain.’ Not
for nothing has Suzanne Collins called the President of Panem, where the poor
starve and freeze in The Hunger Games,
Coriolanus Snow.

The Bard for our 100th Milestone!

In the ongoing research project ‘Classics
& Class’, we have just chosen the hungry plebeians’ confrontation with Shakespeare’s
Coriolanus as our hundredth
permanent online ‘Encounter’ between ancient Greece/Rome and the British
class system. We would like to thank the first classical scholar we can find
pointing out the significance of Shakespeare’s response to the Midland riot in
this ‘Roman play’. It is Chris Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, in
his Plutarch and History (2002).
Prof. Pelling has always insisted that our Mediterranean cultural ancestors
belong to everyone, Jacobean groundlings quite as much as university dons.

Professor Christopher Pelling

This is what makes his appointment
this week by the Department of Education as ‘Classics Czar,’ leader of a
project focusing on the enhancement and growth of the teaching of Classics in
state schools, so important. Pelling, himself a product of the state educational
system in Wales, is a humorous and approachable man without a shred of class or intellectual snobbery. He is also a true democrat. He will take this mission with the seriousness it deserves
and undoubtedly get results. Be sure not to miss what he writes in tomorrow’s Sunday Times.Good news all round.

Not that his mission is going to be
easy. The whole policy as framed by Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove,
looks dangerously like ‘telling’ state schools and their teachers what they really, really
need. This risks rubbing salt into longstanding wounds. It would help if Gove would
stop talking about ‘bog-standard’ state schools, ‘Berlin Walls’ between the
state and private sector, and how state
schools are going to be ‘helped’ (they are always referred to in the passive
voice) to raise their standards. Putting serious money behind expanding the pitifully
small number of places available for enthusiastic Classics graduates to take
a PGCE and actually qualify to teach in state schools would be a useful start.

But the real elephant in this room
is Classical Civilization. Gove does not like talking about the very subject—neither
Latin nor Greek—which now draws most state school pupils and Open University
applicants towards Classics. Class. Civ.
at GCSE and A Level involves studying ancient writings in translation and
material culture widely and critically. It makes a fine preparation for entering
university to study any subject, including the Greek and Roman worlds and their
languages.

THREE TIMES as many A Levels are
taken in Classical Civilization as in Latin. Still not that many—a few thousand--and
I would like to see more. Many talented students arrive in British
universities to study for Classics-related degrees with qualifications in Class.
Civ. and e.g. English, German or History. Gove’s rhetoric overlooks and risks
sounding disrespectful towards these pupils and their dedicated teachers and
perpetuates the real ‘Berlin Wall’—the completely erroneous view that learning
about classical civilization at school or anywhere else is inherently inferior
to learning classical languages.

I have personally had my whole life immeasurably
enriched by reading ancient Greek, and I revel in really fancy metres, refined
prose styles, and arcane dialects. I teach it to anyone who will put up with
me. I am miserable that this exquisite
ancestral birthright and Latin are not available free of charge to every single person
in this country.

Some of the 1000s of UK Class Civ. students

But researching the history of
classics across class boundaries is revealing that some of the most important
pedagogical effects of the Classics have been via individuals’ encounters with
the ancient world through media other than
ancient tongues. Several of my most brilliant colleagues, who have changed how we think about ancient art, philosophy, history, theatre, cities and religion, confess privately that they really didn't excel at or enjoy the linguistic side of Classics. As another enlightened Oxford
Regius Professor of Greek, Gilbert Murray, said over a century ago, ‘Greece,
not Greek, is the object of our study.’ I just don’t see why linguistic study
is inherently more intellectually rigorous or how it produces
a better informed, indeed more civilized citizen, than analysing the whole Odyssey, understanding Pericles’
building project on the Athenian Acropolis or arguing about Aristotle’s Ethics. Please could Mr Gove enlighten
me?